Tuesday, January 1, 2013

A more organized 2013

Happy New Year!

Normally I wait until my birthday to start reflecting on new year goals and resolutions but with only 2.5 months left before baby Kaethler joins our household I KNOW that I need to start working on organizing my house.

So I've decided that in 2013 I want to focus on the following two goals:

Slowing Down - I realize that with a baby about to arrive into our lives it will be pretty busy this year but rather then letting things overwhelm me, I want to practice mentally slowing down. Taking a deep breath and tackling ONE thing at a time so I am not running all over the place and ending up burnt out. With only 2 months left at work I want to implement this and NOT stay at work late like I did in November/December.

Plan, Prepare & Organize - One of the biggest hurdles I've had in my life to achieving balance is the fact that my environment is usually in chaos so in the next 2.5 months I want to organize my house as much as possible and hopefully continue to tackle projects through out the year once I get out of the baby daze that I'm sure will fall on me soon.

With that said, my first project in 2013 has been to tackle the disaster that has become my office. After helping to plan a social, 3 baby showers, a bridal shower, a wedding, an 85th birthday and Christmas in 2012, failing to put away supplies that I pulled out for each event inevitably resulted in this mess.

﻿So this morning after procrastinating for a few hours, I jumped in and started cleaning everything up. Here is what my office looked like this morning when I started...

﻿

....what a mess!

While I organized things into piles and got rid of things that were garbage or should have been somewhere else in the house I dragged my husband away from his relaxing day of video games to hang the needle point that my great grandmother had done a few years before she past away, which my mother generously past down to me. Its amazing how finished a room will look when you start hanging art/photos.

... And after 5 hours I am finally able to sit at my clean desk and write this post, which feels wonderful!

Now that I have a working office again I want to tackle some smaller projects in the office this month that will organize our paper clutter through filing and binders.

My sister also got a beautiful ﻿Silhouette CAMEO from her husband this year for Christmas and I plan on buying some vinyl for her to cut out labels for my containers in the closet which currently contain craft supplies, party supplies, a wrapping station (that desperately needs to be better organized but I'm still looking for inspiration), and gifts for future baby showers and kids birthdays.

On a side note, I used my iPad's camera to take these photos and am not impressed with the quality. I'm think I might have to pull out my camera this year to post clearer pictures, unless there are tricks to using the iPad that will make them look better...suggestions﻿?